The Revelations by Alex Preston

I'm not sure if this book review belongs on this blog or on my other blog, but I've put it here anyway... 

The Revelations by Alex Preston
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

If you think that all Christians are hypocrites and the Alpha Course is a cult, then this is the book for you. However, if you are more realistic in your outlook then the shortcomings of this book will probably annoy you as much as they annoyed me.

The book follows the lives of four young (late 20s) Christians who are helping run 'The Course' for the first time. They are all musicians and the band they play in (at The Course) is known as 'The Revelations', hence the title of the book. The Course itself is clearly a fictionalised and exaggerated version of the Alpha Course, a popular introduction to Christianity course run by many churches in the UK and beyond. However, in the book, 'The Course' is clearly much more of a cult-like entity rather than being merely an entry point into mainstream evangelical Christianity. Indeed, one of the characters in the book refers to The Course as being a cult.

The book is clearly written by someone who is not a Christian and has issues with Christianity. I've been through an Alpha Course, and been involved with leadership in other similar courses, and as a consequence, the behind-the-scenes bits in this book simply do not ring true at all. Course leaders do not behave like this, talk like that, pray like that or sing worship songs like that. Basically, the Course in the book is so much of a caricature that it is unreal.

I know that not all Christians are perfect and honourable, but I can't believe in the scenario given here where all four characters leading the Course are hypocrites, liars, sexually promiscuous (with course attendees) and get drunk (again with course attendees) all the time. While you do get people like that in Churches, generally they are not invited to lead worship or evangelism groups.

The book is split into three sections, the first relates to the 'normal' weekly workings of the Course, the second relates to the weekend retreat, which anyone familiar with Alpha will be familiar with, and the third relates to the unraveling of the lives of the characters following the events of the retreat weekend. I'll not give spoilers.

Given what I've said above, I found section 1 to be unrealistic. I didn't like the characters, I didn't believe the scenarios, I didn't care what happened. But I'd paid for the book so I kept reading...

Section 2 was more interesting, and you do start to care a little for some of the characters. Particularly Lee, who is clearly a fragile character with various complicated needs, which obviously is going to start things spiraling out of control in the third section. But the prevalent sexual promiscuity and drunken debauchery through the weekend retreat is so far from believable for anyone who's ever been on one, that the thing is simply unrealistic. Half of it I could relate to, half of it would never happen like that. This is a book written by an external viewer imagining what might happen on such courses, not someone who's actually been there.

But. By the third section I was caring for the characters and genuinely wanted to find out how all this was going to resolve. There are a couple of twists that send the story heading off in directions you don't expect and it is a fun ride. Then the story ends, but there is still 10% of the book left... The final bit drags as a few final 'revelations' come out, some which are expected, some less so, and you realise that all that has gone before is not exactly as you thought. And at the end you realise that none of the characters are honorable, even the ones you thought were basically good people. Its all about money, sex and power. None of the characters has any other driving motivation. Which is a crap way to end the book.

I'm disappointed. The author could have filled his book with a variety of characters with different wants and desires, but actually no. As far as he is concerned, all Christians are drunken, promiscuous, hypocrites.

Given how far from reality that belief is, the ending is a huge let down.

Oh, and by the way, there is quite a lot of unnecessary sex in this book. With quite a few scenes with details which we really didn't need to know, and only serve to underline the hypocrisy of the characters further. We got the message, OK?

Bottom line is that I know a lot of Christians and I don't know any people like these. Sure, I know Christians who have had affairs, sure I know Christians who drink too much occasionally, sure I know Christians who are motivated by greed, sure I know Christians who lie and cheat. But on the whole, the vast majority of Christians I know are not like this all the time. So in the end, I simply don't believe this story.

Heart Fanatic

I discovered the band Heart in 1986. Sure, they had been around for a decade by this point, but they had been pretty much ignored or overlooked by UK radio stations until 'These Dreams' came along and broke into radio playlists, if not actually the UK top 40 singles chart. I quite liked the song. Soon after this I discovered their 1985 self-titled album in my local audio library. I borrowed it. Nobody had recommended it to me, nobody had mentioned it, I had never heard a review, I had only heard one track on it.

From the first listen, I loved it. 

For a teenage boy in 1986 it was the ultimate rock album. It was perfectly of its time and virtually every song was great. By the time I had to return the album to the library I had probably listened to it about 50 times. I had become a Heart fanatic.

The next few months became a frantic search for other albums by Heart. Rumour had it that their earlier material was quite unlike this album and I might not like it. So I couldn't just rush out and buy the early stuff. And besides, funds were limited. But nobody in my circle of friends had heard anything before 1985. Eventually, it turned out that the big brother of one of my classmates (hello Andy Ketchin) had two tapes by Heart, so I finally got to hear the albums 'Magazine' and 'Dog and Butterfly' (both from 1978). I loved them too. Whew. I could take the risk and buy some of the earlier albums.

By this time I also had a bootleg concert of Heart live at the NHK Hall in Tokyo from 25th June 1986 so I knew a few songs from the early albums. Thus 'Little Queen' (1977) featuring the classic Barracuda was first on my purchase list. What an amazing album - it quickly became my 2nd favourite Heart album, a position it has probably retained from that day to this, despite the number 1 place having changed since then!

Over the space of the next six months I bought 'Dreamboat Annie' (1976), 'Dog and Butterfly' and 'Magazine' (got it really cheap at a record fair). Despite them being considerably more expensive than most LPs in my local record shops, I eventually gave in to temptation and bought 'Bebe le Strange' and 'Greatest Hits / Live' ( both 1980). Bebe le Strange was a disappointment. While its not a bad album, its not a great one either. Sure, it has some great tracks on it, but quite a few lower quality ones too.

I had heard tale, by this point, of an album called 'Private Audition' that came after Bebe le Strange, but all I had heard about it was that it was weird and not very good. You have to remember that this is all way before the internet, Spotify, Wikipedia, etc. The only way you could hear rock music back then was if someone you knew had it, or if Tommy Vance played it on his Friday night rock show (sigh, nostalgia). I also knew there was a song I really liked on the NHK bootleg called 'Allies' but it wasn't on any of the albums I'd heard of.

1987 brought the release of a new Heart album, 'Bad Animals'. I think I did buy it on the day of release. At the time it seemed great, but time has not been too kind to this album. However, the commercial success of Bad Animals in the UK meant that record stores started stocking all the Heart back catalogue. 'Private Audition' (1982) and a previously unheard of (by me, at least) album 'Passionworks' (1983) appeared in stores and were quickly bought by me. Private Audition wasn't as weird or bad as I'd been led to believe, but Passionworks was brilliant - here's where that song 'Allies' came from. Its basically the precursor to the 1985 Heart album, and pretty much in the same vein. For a while it became my number 1 favourite Heart album. When Heart toured the UK in 1988, I managed to get the sleeve of Passionworks signed by all three male members of the band, but sadly not by Ann or Nancy.

So by the time I left school in 1988, I had all the Heart albums on vinyl, most of the 12" singles, a few 7" singles, a wall covered in Heart posters and a well worn and much loved Heart tour t-shirt.

I have to admit things began to cool off between me and Heart from then on in. 'Brigade' (1990) came on the back of a couple of Mutt Lange written power ballads that I didn't much like, and which spoiled the whole album for me. The 1991 live album 'Rock the house: Live' was nothing special, so when 'Desire walks on' came along in 1993, I didn't even buy it. Besides, by then grunge had come along and killed big hair, big shoulders, power ballad rock. The obligatory post-grunge acoustic live album 'The Road Home' didn't interest me at the time. It looked like it was all over for Heart. And so it was...

... until 2004 when Heart returned with their best album so far. 'Jupiter's Darling' came with no expectations at all. I went to see them on the 2004 UK tour for a bit of nostalgia and came out from a fantastic gig absolutely desperate to buy the new album. 8 years on and it is probably still one of my favourite albums by anyone, certainly my favourite Heart album, and definitely my favourite album from the whole decade of the 2000s!

Their next release, 'Red Velvet Car' (2010) came with expectations and didn't quite live up to them. It is not a bad album. I'd go as far as to say its quite good. But the problem is, its only that, quite good.

So I was unsure what to expect from the brand new release 'Fanatic', which came out this week. I kind of expected a disappointment. I knew it couldn't be as good as Jupiter's Darling. I hoped it would be quite good. The cover art suggests an album that has been knocked out quickly, which is not a good start. The running time is short (39 minutes), which sent alarm bells ringing. And the guitarist who seemed to inject new life into Heart to help bring about the greatness that is Jupiter's Darling, Craig Bartock, was not involved with the album at all. But I bought it anyway.

I'm glad I did. It rocks. It rawks! Whereas Red Velvet Car kind of washes over you, Fanatic grabs you by various body parts and drags you into the midst of raw distorted guitars, heavy riffs, classic rock hooks and plain, simple and pure-distilled-essence-of-rock drums. This album wears its heart on its sleeve. Ann and Nancy have always admitted to being huge Led Zep fans, but here they do the classic imitation-is-the-sincerest-form-of-flattery thing and just put all their Zep fandom into song. They admit as much on the title track, which not only states that they are Fanatics, but it riffs on the Misty Mountain Hop riff, just in case you didn't get the point. Page and Plant should be proud of their illegitimate offspring.

But its not just classic rock, loud guitars, and Plantesque screaming. There's so much more. There's something for everyone here. How this album manages that in only 39 minutes is a mystery to me, but it does it. Ballads, acoustic bits, funky bits, loud bits, quiet bits, moving bits and soothing bits. On the first couple of listens 'Million Miles' stood out as the best thing in here, but on subsequent listens everything else seems to have risen up to the same level. Its all great.

So there you have it. Heart's best album since 2004, probably one of the top 5 of their career, and the most enjoyable album I've bought this year so far.

Listen. You'll probably like it.

The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson

I don't really publish much on this blog these days, do I? And when I do it seems to be mostly book reviews. So not to break that pattern, here's another brief book review:

"The Final Empire" by Brandon Sanderson, subtitled 'Mistborn, Book One' was a book I knew nothing about until browsing my local Waterstones bookshop a few weeks back. It was a book recommended to me by one of those little "I like this book because..." cards with which the staff in the bookshop recommend some books at you. I flicked through the pages of several of these recommended books, and noted down the details of four of them. I then went home, downloaded the Kindle samples of each of the four and read them. On the basis of this, I bought (the actual physical books, in the bookshop) two of them and decided to read this one first (I would have bought the Kindle versions, as they were cheaper, had I not been buying these to take on holiday with me - I didn't really want to leave my Kindle sitting beside a pool while I went in for a dip, but I'll happily leave a paperback book in this manner). So anyway...

The setting of the book, as summarised on the cover, poses the question "What if the Dark Lord won?" and while the book is not intended to be set in the same world as Lord of the Rings, the premise is broadly similar to the situation which might have happened had Frodo failed to destroy the ring and if Sauron had got it and enslaved humanity for a thousand years. I say 'humanity' here as there are no elves, dwarfs, hobbits, orcs, or any other non-human species here. Well, none are apparent for most of the book, at least. So we start with the setting of a world (or at least an Empire, we never see beyond its boundaries) ruled over by an apparently immortal, possibly divine tyrant, who has turned a once green and pleasant land into a grim and murky land where trees and shrubs are brown, colourful flowers don't exist and a ring of volcanoes surrounding the main city in the empire spew ash into the sky constantly. By day there are ashfalls and by night there are mists, which the common people ("skaa") are too scared to go into. Basically, life is hard, death is common, and it has always been thus.

I'll say up front that my favourite kinds of fantasy books are those where the impossible objective is stated early on in the story and then we see, usually with a number of surprises and twists, how the impossible objective is eventually realised. This is one of those kinds of books, so I was inclined to like it from the word go. It isn't really a spoiler for me to reveal they the objective of our rag-tag band of heroes (I also generally prefer novels with a rag-tag band of hereos; much better than muscular warrior types) is to overthrow the tyrant, put someone else in authority, and - if such a thing were possible - to kill the 'Lord Ruler'. As this is a 'Book One' in a series of at least four parts (I don't yet know if part 4 is the conclusion to the series, or if the door remains open for further parts), I wasn't expecting all of this to be achieved in one book and, indeed, this book ends up in a very unexpected way leaving the reader wondering 'where on earth do they go from here?'. But the ending is actually far more satisfying than I was expecting - even 2/3 of the way through this book, I was expecting the book to end with a kind of "And so the war began..." type conclusion. This book doesn't go there, it is so much better than that. 

The book that this book reminded me most of is "Tigana" by Guy Gavriel Kay, and considering that this book measures up to Tigana in a rather favourable light, and that Tigana remains my all time favourite book of all time (!), I'd have to rank this book as one of the best I've ever read. OK, there are a few minor things wrong with it (some sections are too long; the narrative feels slightly odd on the rare occasions that it is not written from the point of view of one of the two main characters), but on the whole this is a world which it is a joy to lose yourself in, with characters you can believe in, and a plot that you actually care about. When I reached the end of this book I was on holiday and was really quite annoyed that I couldn't instantly download the next installment to my Kindle and keep reading. For what its worth, the other two books that this reminded me of were "The Book of the New Sun" by Gene Wolfe - I know some people rate this as one of the greatest fantasy novels ever, and exploring the strange world of The Final Empire is much like finding out about the world in Wolfe's books - also there were some similarities in this to the Belgariad by David Eddings, but generally in ways which made me think 'this is better than the Belgariad because...'.

I could go into details about how magic works in this book/world, but I won't because it is much more fun to find out about it as you go along. I have to say that the way some of the magic usage is described in fight scenes does get a little bit of a drag, but that is a very minor niggle with an otherwise fascinating new take on how magic might work in a fantasy realm. In that respect (unnecessary descriptions of how magic works), this book also reminded me of "Master of the five magics" by Lyndon Hardy, which I read back in the 80s, but The Final Empire is so far above that book that the comparison is hardly fair.

Basically, if you like 'high' fantasy novels where a bunch of rag-tag heroes set out to overthrow an oppressive ruler, then you'll absolutely love this novel.

Best book I've read this year. Possibly the best I've read this century (hmmm, does it trump GGK's "Under Heaven"? I'm not sure, but they're in the same league). Certainly the most involving fantasy world I've lost myself in for a long time. Highly recommended.

Moon over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch

You may remember I reviewed "Rivers of London" last summer. "Moon over Soho" is the sequel. In the last review, amongst other things, I said:

1. "You know those detective stories where the male lead character meets attractive female characters and they rapidly find themselves in an explicit sex scene? This isn't one of those stories." and
   
2. "The fact that much of the romantic tension still remains at the end of the book suggests to me that the author intends to develop the relationships between these characters over several books..."

The first thing I should say is that Moon over Soho fails to follow in the footsteps of those observations. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Minor spoilers may follow, but I'll not give anything significant away.

Rivers of London ended up with one of the potential love interest characters seriously injured following the events described in that book. While she does have a minor role in this book, her part in the story is surprisingly brief and she only really exists here to make our hero feel a bit guilty, every now and then. The other potential love interest character from the first book doesn't feature here at all, so maybe I got the wrong impression from the first book, but anyway.

The story carries on with our hero, the apprentice to the supernatural-investigating police inspector, investigating two different but connected magical murder inquiries. In one, a series of apparently healthy and very talented jazz musicians die of 'natural causes' in unusual circumstances. In the other, a series of men die in very painful ways, apparently at the, erm, hands of a murderer with 'vagina dentata'. Nuff said. (Google it if you need more info, which you really don't.)

The story is entertaining and moves along at a good pace, which accelerates nicely towards the conclusion. Along the way we find out a bit more about our hero's family, a little bit more about magic, quite a lot about jazz, and a little glimpse into the country's magical past. I suspect there's more there for future books, but then again I was wrong in my predictions after the last book, so I could be wrong again.

As I hinted above, there is a lot more sex in this book than in the last. It kind of springs out of nowhere and seems a bit out of place, but then you come to realise that actually it is part of the plot and is there for a purpose. It actually does serve to make the conclusion a bit more involving.

There are fewer instances of the clunky writing/editing that I noticed in the first book, although there are still one or two points where the narrative jumps in a slightly disconcerting way - usually when providing a bit of back story for an event or character. But that's a minor niggle.

It becomes apparent that there is a 'Moriarty' type criminal mastermind somewhere in the background in this story and it is both annoying and intriguing in the way that his storyline is not resolved by the end of this book.

The two primary crime stories are both resolved here, one in a satisfactory way, and the other a bit less so. Rather than being a single plotline in its own right, the second murder inquiry becomes merged into the larger 'Moriarty' type plot, so its conclusion is brief and not fully resolved. But don't let you stop that reading this excellent book.

So, should you read this book? Yes, I think so, but only if you read Rivers of London first.

Is it better than its predecessor? No, but its not significantly worse either. More of the same really. If you liked the first, then you'll like the second. And probably the third too.

Will I read the next installment of the story "Whispers Underground" when it is published in the summer? Absolutely, yes.

Loony Dook in 3D

Having downloaded the 3D photo app for my phone, I thought I'd give it a try. Here's two pictures of this year's Loony Dook in 3D. Hope you've got a pair of Red/Cyan specs handy. Utterly pointless, but still...

Doctor Who: Let's kill Hitler [first impressions]

What? Eh? What???

More reasoned thoughts to follow.

Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch

Just finished reading this. It seemed like quite a short book, or maybe I just got engrossed in it and read it faster than usual, its hard to tell when you're reading on a Kindle.

The basic plot (no significant spoilers) is that a young London uniformed police constable gets posted to the scene of an inexplicable murder and interviews one witness, who happens to be a ghost. As a consequence of this and other events, he ends up apprenticed to the London police's only supernatural-investigating inspector. Yes, more or less a London police 'X-Files'.

The plot is interesting, engaging, fast moving and fun. About 3/5ths of the way through the book, you think you see how its going to resolve, and then wonder how the author is going to pad that out for the remaining chapters, and then the plot twists, and twists again, and again. In quite a roller coaster ride of events.

For the most part, the book is well written, but there are a few clunky scenes where it seems that a few lines of dialogue or description are simply missing. For example, at the end of the 2nd murder scene events, one of the characters dies. I read the page about three times and its still unclear to me how they died. In one paragraph they were running past our hero, in the next they were dead and sprawled on the floor, but with no description connecting the two. In a couple of other places (though none as obvious as that one) there seem to be short snippets of description that are simply missing. But its not a huge problem, and didn't really detract from my enjoyment of the story.

You know those detective stories where the male lead character meets attractive female characters and they rapidly find themselves in an explicit sex scene? This isn't one of those stories. There's a nicely written underlying air of unresolved sexual tension that runs through parts of this story as the main character completely fails to have liaisons with his female co-worker and one of the other female characters in the book. The fact that much of the romantic tension still remains at the end of the book suggests to me that the author intends to develop the relationships between these characters over several books, and that very much makes me want to go straight on to the next book, although the reality of an unresolved storyline stretching across three or more books might get annoying after a bit. But maybe it won't come to that.

So, I'd recommend this book to you. Its a lot of fun, is quite interesting, and there's clearly much more involving these characters to come in future books.

Oh, and I've just discovered that Ben Aaronovitch was one of the writers on Doctor Who back in the late 80s. He is responsible for the scene in which a Dalek was first witnessed (by the 7th Doctor and Ace) hovering up the stairs! Actually, I remember that story with some fondness, although the SFX were typically rubbish, as I recall.

And one of the many problems of having a Kindle is that I could simply buy 'Moon over Soho' right now and start reading the next book straight away...